The Historians' History of the World 05

Nevertheless the exultation of the Romans at the gradual change in their fortunes had been repressed by the alarming accounts they continued to receive from Asia, where the king of Pontus, the ablest and most powerful opponent they had yet encountered in the East, was shaking the edifice of their dominion to its centre. They hastened to send their best general and their choicest armies to meet him; and they were disposed in the moment of victory to make further concessions, in order to disengage themselves from the hostility of the crushed and broken Italians. The lex Plautia-Papiria

extended to all their Italian allies the privilege which had been accorded to Umbria and Etruria by the

lex Julia

. The franchise, that is, of the city was offered generally to such of the Italians as chose to claim it in person within sixty days. The Romans followed up this specious concession by great moderation in the use of their final victory. Very few, at least, of the captive chiefs of the confederacy were punished with death. The territory of the subjected cities was not confiscated to the state, although the condition of its finances compelled the senate to sell the lands appropriated to the pontiffs and augurs beneath the shadow of the Capitol itself. The Italians, weary of the war, were easily appeased by this politic treatment. Corfinium, the presumptive rival of Rome, dwindled once more into a petty provincial town. The political combination of the states of the peninsula, the offspring of a moment of enthusiasm, fell in pieces, never to be reunited again; and even their common language, proscribed by the Romans in the public instruments of their cities, fell into disuse, and was speedily forgotten. But the results of the war still lingered after the war itself had died away. Bands of armed marauders continued to prowl about the country, exciting partial movements in various quarters. The mountains of Samnium, and the great forests of Sila, continued to harbour the enemies of peace and order rather than the enemies of Rome. There, for more than half a century, the materials of insurrection were never wanting; political outlaws and fugitive slaves still maintained themselves against the regular forces of the republic; life and property were rendered insecure; the rustic labourer and the wayfaring man were kidnapped on the public roads; even in the cities men began to accustom themselves to the wearing of weapons, nor did the dignified and noble venture to travel abroad without an armed retinue of clients and retainers.

[88 B.C.]

The lex Plautia-Papiria, so called from the tribunes who effected its enactment, offered, as we have seen, the franchise to all the allies of Rome in Italy. The boon, however, was far from universally accepted. The richest and the poorest classes were those to which alone it proved seductive—to the former, for the sake of sharing the fruits of distant conquest; to the latter, on account of the largess it offered to the dissolute and idle. Of these classes many, we may suppose, flocked to Rome, and took up their residence within reach of the Forum. The names of the chiefs of the Italian confederacy, of Papius and Egnatius, of Asinius and Cluentius, of Vettius and Afranius, rank from henceforth among the aristocracy of Rome; while her orators and historians might plausibly attribute the increasing degeneracy of the inferior populace to the foreign elements which now began so deeply to tinge it. But the middle classes of the Italians, to whom these advantages were less accessible, and to whom constant attendance at assemblies and elections was impossible, found themselves amply compensated for the loss at home, where, content with their own municipal privileges and honours, they could enjoy without rivalry or disturbance the comfort and dignity of self-government. The number of new citizens thus enrolled on the list of the censors was not disproportioned, perhaps, to the new tribes, eight, or as some say ten, which were now added to the existing thirty-five. The citizen was still compelled to present himself in person at the polling-booths; the distance of his actual residence could not plead against inveterate usage and the sanction of the national religion. For the Roman Forum was a holy place, elections and assemblies were holy ordinances, sanctified by auspices and ritual ceremonies; the devices of modern governments, by which the votes of federal communities can be taken on the spot, or their voices represented by local delegates, were inadmissible on the principles of Roman, and indeed generally of all ancient polity.